First HMV, then Blockbuster. The shops decay, the shops decay and fall; the downloads bleep their burthens to the screen. When I was in my twenties, Blockbuster — then regarded as a slightly flashy US import — seemed like the future of home entertainment. It sold popcorn! You could return the videos through a slot in the door! Now you couldn’t imagine the use for it.

What was surprising about the likes of Blockbuster and HMV was not that they were headed for the dustbin: it’s that they still existed. The generation of business that did much to see them off — the DVD-by-post outfits — are themselves scrabbling not to go the same way. I daresay satellite telly will look quaint a decade from now.

It’s sometimes hard to step back and see how the pace of technological change affects the texture of our day-to-day lives. In most other periods of history — even those that saw industrialisation or the spread of the printed word — the world, for most people in the West, remained roughly the same.

Tidying the house the other day I found a handful of MiniDiscs. Remember when they were the future? Or LaserDiscs? The mid-word capitalisation (aka CamelCase) is the only thing about those two that isn’t yet — alas — redundant. In our times not just entire technologies but entire industries can come into being, flourish, and then vanish within a decade or two.

I still feel baffled, and somewhat cheated, that estate agents and travel agents aren’t yet extinct as a category. Hwaer cwom, as the Anglo-Saxons put it, the fax-machine repairmen, the concordance-makers, the cinema projectionists and (Google yesterday announced a technology to obviate them) the computer password? Where are they now? What will the next generation of black cabbies do now that sat-nav does The Knowledge? It seems quite plausible that were we to time-travel 20 years into the future the only things we’d recognise would be lawyers and Angus Steak Houses.

A superb dispatch from Christina Lamb reminds us of the disgrace of Guantánamo Bay. She describes a 29-year-old Afghan called Obaidullah, detained for 11 years without trial. It’s suggested he may have been confused with a nine-fingered Taliban leader with whom he shares a name. Charges were dropped but there’s no move to let him go. He last saw his 10-year-old daughter when she was two days old. If you’re prosecuting wars in the name of human rights, that needs to be more than a slogan. We’re agitating about some lunk cheating at bicycles while this man is let to rot. If Obaidullah were a first world white man, his case would be seen as among the gravest wrongs.

Due sarf is the Geri way now

Live long enough, and sooner or later someone you know will go out with Ginger Spice. And so it has come to pass. I open my copy of the Currant Bun, and there is a picture of Geri Halliwell on the arm of her new beau, “gambling firm tycoon Anton Kaszubowski, 39”, described as a “Russian millionaire”. Well, I don’t know about millionaire but the last I heard of it Anton — who was at university with me, and went out with one of my close friends for a bit — hailed from Forest Hill, south London, and had a Polish dad. Among us students he was regarded as a rather exotic bird, having worked briefly as a male model. His skincare regime was the envy of all. Does memory deceive me or did he once give us all a fright by appearing with a blue facepack, like a Smurf?

Anyway, he’s a very nice fellow and I hope you’ll join me in wishing the couple well.

Private sector just cashes in

Two Sunday newspaper stories invite the compare-and-contrast approach. One is the news that NHS trusts are paying agency nurses up to £1,800 a day to cover staff shortages. The other is that recruitment policies for the police are expected to change (allowing some graduates to join at Inspector level) to recognise that the forthcoming cut in a PC’s starting pay to £19,000 a year isn’t likely to attract the best talent. One outsourced nurse, in other words can cost in 11 days what a new police constable costs us in a year. Assuming 252 working days in a year, just the 20 per cent agency fee per man-year of nursing is about £90,000, aka four and a half coppers. There you see the efficiency of the private sector — at making money for the private sector.